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Nokia Sells Qt
Google85 writes "Now that Nokia has shifted to a Windows Phone-centric smartphone strategy, it's only natural for the company to divest itself of responsibility with regard to the Qt framework. It has been announced Digia will acquire the Qt commercial licensing and services business from Nokia, including the transfer of some 3,500 desktop and embedded customers actively using Qt today."
This is the commercial licensing side of Qt, *NOT* Qt. The major thing that will matter to the open source community is whether Qt will still be developed as a robust cross platform toolkit, not so much what happens to the commercial licensing business. Even Qt's future on phones doesn't concern me too much - the smart phone industry moving towards "app store" models and locked down platforms is a much bigger concern. (I'm just waiting for Apple to announce they're moving to an App Store model for all their desktop machines...)
Where Qt really shines is as a toolkit for graphical applications on the desktop. THAT's what ultimately concerns me - will the developers who have made Qt such an outstanding cross platform graphical toolkit will be allowed to continue their work as a paid, full time job? Never mind the phones, KDE and a vast array of non-KDE desktop applications that are important parts of the open source ecosystem rely on Qt (especially those that have to deploy on Windows). Would the commercial Linux vendors step in to keep the Qt devs programming, much as they have hired Linux kernel folk in the past? Libreoffice indicates they will act to protect key elements of open source, so fingers crossed. A statement along those lines would be reassuring, if they are in fact able and willing to fall back to that solution if necessary.
"I object to doing things that computers can do." -- Olin Shivers, lispers.org
QT's customers are developers who licence QT commercial edition, not end users. This includes companies such as Opera and Google who's products are used by millions of people.
But I'm sure you knew that already.
WTF!
The good bit of Symbian - uses orders of magnitude less resources that the competition.
The bad bit - the UI from hell.
And you suggest putting a Symbian UI on Android?
Like I said, WTF.
(Check out SBP mobile shell for Symbian to see what could have been done if Nokia weren't totally fucked up. Look at it running on a low-end piece of junk like the 5320 - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xZtKTOTus7s ).
Watch this Heartland Institute video
After the announcement they become one of Microsoft's bitches pumping out handsets which are substantially similar to the likes coming out from LG / Samsung / HTC.
Not quite. There's no "dedicated" WP7 vendor so far - all of the companies you've listed mostly do Android phones (Samsung is also pushing its Bada on low-cost phones); WP is the odd one in their lineup. Nokia, meanwhile, could become the maker of WP phones - much like HTC did back in the day when they rode the WinMo wave. The trick is in knowing when to jump off.
the results show Digia as a big Microsoft fan, supporter, customer, partner.
Watch Qt licensing and support fees to skyrocket to drive Qt out of the market. Nokia won't be implicated but that is probably the plan. Anything cross platform has _always_ been a threat to Microsoft and they have done everything legal and many time illegal to destroy these. Qt is a threat to Microsoft and destroying Qt also helps them hurt companies like Google and Adobe who base many of their tools and products on Qt. IMO
I figured this would happen but hoped it wouldn't. it sucks.
LoB
"Anyone who stands out in the middle of a road looks like roadkill to me." --Linus